Stay Young

The Stay Young Book

The Net

Picture a fisherman from long ago, long before cities and societies. We can call him Ug. Ug knows he likes to eat fish, but has a tough time catching them with his bare hands. He and his wife Og are sitting by the fire one night talking about this problem. He pokes a stick through his daily catch to put it over the fire and she has an “Aha!” moment. It would be so much easier to catch the live ones if they poke them with a sharp stick. It was easier and they had more fish to eat after that.

It may not have happened exactly like that. Somewhere early in history, however, the spear was invented for fishing. Somewhere later on that sharp stick was developed into the trident, the three-pronged pitchfork from the last chapter.

Some time after Og and Ug, the next big fishing discovery was made. A young woman—let’s call her Ack—was washing a skin in a brook when a large fish swam by. She used the skin to catch that fish and they ate well that night. Eek, the young thinker of the tribe thought about this a long time. He found that skins were slow because they held too much water. So he poked some holes in the skin and caught a fish that way. He showed this to Ack. She was so impressed she married him and they went on to start a successful fishing business. In some way similar to this that the next great fishing tool was born: the net.

The net proved to be such a useful thing it was adapted to a whole lot more than fishing. It is still used today to catch everything from butterflies to wild animals.

The monkey

Imagine for a moment that you are a monkey out in the wild. You are wandering through the jungle, doing monkey things. You come to a tree that has dropped a whole lot of ripe fruit. Wonderful! You don’t even have to climb to get it down. You lay there surrounded by sweet fruit, stuffing your face and feeling like the luckiest monkey alive.

While you are distracted, some hunters looking to sell a monkey to the zoo sneak up on you. There you are, relaxed and with a full belly, drowsing the afternoon away when suddenly… you are trapped by something you don’t understand. You struggle to get free. It was a net they tossed over you, but you know nothing about nets. So you fight and scream and continue to struggle.

But you don’t get free. In fact, in your efforts to get free you get even more wrapped up in the net. As you struggle madly to be free you also, quickly, get tired. Now you are much easier for the hunters to wrap up and take back to their zoo.

If you were a wise monkey, you might have played that a little bit differently. You could have stopped for a moment, taken a breath or two, and looked at the net. You might have noticed it has edges. You could pick up the edge, roll out from underneath it, and scamper up that fruit tree. From up there you could make a face at the clumsy human hunters and escape into the jungle.

Not reacting is so hard to do, though. When you, the monkey, are caught in that net, all you can think of is getting free. No matter how wise you are something inside takes over. It kicks and screams and struggles against this strange trap and the hold it has on you. In the middle of that moment, it is difficult to do anything else.

There is a big part of each of us that is still monkey. When something we do not understand traps us, we blindly struggle to get free. We may kick and scream, rage and cry, but we seldom stop and study the trap.

Those “net moments”—the times you are caught in the net blindly struggling to get free—are the next biggest cause of aging. The struggle, the fear and anger that arise, the violence that inevitably follows, and the ultimate exhaustion are some of the biggest aging times in your life. Like pitchfork moments, net moments come without warning. The net can fall on you at any time. It is easy to escape when you recognize it. When you do not, it can seem an impossible trap. And the more you struggle against it, the more entangled, frustrated, and exhausted you grow.

Also like pitchfork moments, it is not the moment itself that ages you. It is your response to it. You can learn to recognize that net the moment it lands, take a deep breath, and get free. You cannot prevent net moments from ever happening, but you can learn how to control the monkey’s response to them. You can escape the net. In doing so, you will also escape the result of these moments. You will not get older.

What are these moments and how do you recognize them? What is the net? It may be simpler to think of it as “conflict.”

I define this conflict—a “net moment”—as any time one part of you wants something and another part fights it. A fight with someone else would probably fall into this category. In the majority of net moments, however, the conflict is within. Something in you is both the monkey and the net.

A healthy reaction to a net moment will allows you to recognize and escape it. Sometimes, however, the net completely will trap you. You may think that you do not have much conflict in your life. You do. If you look or feel even a little bit older than you did five or ten years ago, you have been through some unnoticed net moments.

I am not just talking about fist-fights. It is not only street gangs, people who fight in bars and bullies in school who deal with conflict. If you are here in a human body you deal with net moments many times each day. Whether you recognize those moments and how you respond to them make all the difference in your world.

When you want to go home from work and your boss asks you to stay late, that is a net moment. Two separate parts of you pull you in opposite directions. The part that has a date or needs to pick up the kids screams at you to go home. Like the monkey, it wants to be free. The part that wants to be a good employee or make people happy or fears losing your job works like a net. It traps the monkey part of you.

When you are walking to bed at night, exhausted, and you stub your toe on something, that is a net moment. One part of you is exhausted. It just wants to get into bed and sleep. Another part, the one in pain, traps you there. It is hurting and wants to scream at whatever attacked you. One tries to put you to sleep. One keeps you awake.

When you are caught in traffic or behind the slow person at the market, those are net moments. The monkey in you wants to get wherever you are going. The thing that stops you is the net.

When someone says something that hurts you, intentionally or no, that is a net moment.

When you want to fish or go to the park and it starts to rain, that is a net moment.

When you want to eat something and your diet, or doctor, or parent or partner says, “no,” that is a net moment.

When you want to do something and someone or something stops you, that is a net moment.

When you want to see a comedy and your partner wants to see romance, that is a net moment.

When you are late and cannot find your keys or your car won’t start, that is a net moment.

When you are pushing to get something done, that is a net moment.

When you feel regret, that is a net moments.

These net moments happen to you all the time. So much so that they seem harmless. Many times each day you move toward something and something else stops us. It happens so often you may not even notice. “It’s just part of life.” Usually we try to forget about these moments and move on.

But you can not forget about them! These times are some of the most important ones in your life. When you pay attention to them they teach you an immense amount. When you do not, they trap you. You have a little time at the start of a net moment to recognize it and respond wisely—to escape from the net. After that instant you can get so wrapped up in it that you can not get free.

How do you get free? How can the net be easy to escape? Once you are in a conflict, it can seem so impossible to get out. It is, once you are wrapped in the net. In that brief moment before the monkey mind reacts and starts to struggle, you have a choice. You can recognize the moment, take a breath or two, and look for the edges of the net. When you find one, you can crawl out from under it and get free.

It is possible to escape. After a while it is even easy. Once you learn to recognize net moments and respond to them wisely, you will be amazed out how many of them you encounter each day. Within a few weeks net moments will become so obvious to you that you will find it hard to believe you were ever caught by them. The next surprising thing that you will begin to notice is how many others are still trapped by their net moments, completely unaware of how easy it is to get free.

Next Chapter